Every year, drowsy driving kills about 1,500 people and injures about 71,000 more in the United States alone. Sixty percent of drivers, or about 168 million people, admit to driving a vehicle while drowsy in the past year. Over 100 million people have experienced falling asleep at the wheel.
Current solutions to drowsy driving have proven inadequate. Some solutions involve tracking a driver's eyes to determine whether the driver is falling asleep. More specifically, these tracking systems can determine whether a driver is looking at the road, and if he or she is not, the system can alert the driver to cause them to wake up. However, systems that track the driver's eyes fail to alert the driver soon enough. By the time the system detects that a driver is asleep, it is too late—the driver may have already lost control of the vehicle.
Similar limitations exist with respect to solutions that monitor the position and/or movement of a driver's head. Some of these systems use accelerometers attached to the driver's head, for example via an earpiece, to determine whether the driver's head has dropped as a result of sleep onset. Again, however, these systems cannot detect sleep until it is too late. Furthermore, these solutions are bulky and uncomfortable to wear, causing drivers to avoid using them in the first place.
In order to maintain a safe driving condition, a driver must remain awake, rather than being woken up immediately after falling asleep. For at least these reasons, a need exists for detecting and alerting a drowsy driver. More specifically, a need exists for detecting a pre-sleep indicator and intervening to prevent sleep onset from occurring at all.